I'm not sure you have understood the argument made by myriad here. Consider a parallel situation: crude oil is a product of nature, but getting it out of the ground and refining it into gasoline or other distillates involves a great deal of technology and ingenuity. If I invented a new way to refine oil into something that had the combustibility of gasoline but behaved differently - ignition at lower or higher temperatures, say, or that burned more cleanly - then my novel formulation would certainly be patentable.

Likewise, Myriad has been granted a patent on the isolated genes - their ability to produce DNA containing the two BRCA genes in quantity. The utility here is that if you're a medical researcher you can just order up this stuff for your research lab in a bottle, so to speak, instead of going through the tortuous business of isolating and purifying it in useful quantities. Now Myriad's competitors would like to do that too, and large research labs would like to do it for themselves. But Myriad has argued, successfully so far, that it invested all the effort and expense in learning how to do this reliably, and is entitled to recoup that investment by selling the product of all its research and development.

They didn't apply for a patent on the genes that lie within people's flesh and blood as part of their own DNA. They applied for a patent on the extracted, purified, and commoditized form of a single gene. If you could come up with a way to extract BRCA and BRCA-2 in a form that's useful to genetic researchers but employing a different process and final form from that of Myriad, then you wouldn't be infringing on their patent. Conversely, if you had spent a lot of money and time on the development of such a technology, wouldn't you be anxious to recoup that investment? It would be nice if they just gave it away, but then how are they going to pay their employees and attract future investors? What exactly are the economic incentives to expend all the effort and expense on developing an industrial process if one is not allowed to commercialize the result?

The problem with their argument is that pulling out genes in large quantity from an isolated sample is pretty damn easy. Its molecular biology 101; we clone genes all kinds of genes all the time. If you read their technical spec (http://www.myriad.com/lib/technical-specifications/BRACAnaly...) its obvious that while they have the process very streamlined, they're doing nothing fundamentally differently than any other lab would do if Myriad didn't hold these patents. PCR and dye labeling sequencing methods are commonly used tools; the idea that Myriad has come up with anything novel is absurd.

It's easy now; I don't think it was all that easy back in 1994 when they first sequenced BRCA-1 or when they first began work on it back around 1988.

It was easy even then. PCR and Sanger sequencing have been in wide use for a long time. Yes, Myriad did do a lot of streamlining and optimizing, but everything they did was with preexisting technologies. There's nothing novel or innovative at all—they developed a very efficient analysis pipeline, but that's not something anyone should ever be awarded a patent for.

In that case, why haven't their legal antagonists built their case around a straightforward prior art argument, instead of amking normative arguments about the patentability of human DNA?

Not sure, might have something to do with the ACLU/AMP wanting to set a wide reaching precedent that patents of endogenous DNA sequences are not ok? They won't just want to win the single case, they want to change the wider legal landscape concerning patents and biological science.

I did it in an undergrad lab class in 1994. It took some fancy equipment, target data from published reports on particular sequences, appropriate cells, salts, and enzymes. And it took me about 25 lab hours to get it right.

But it wasn't hard. An undergrad could do it.

Maybe not in 1988, though. I was in junior high then.

I'm not against techniques, manufacturing methods or process patents. What I'm against is the wholesale patenting of DNA. Now, if someone comes up with a new technique which is more cost effective, faster, safer, etc. they will not be able to sell the thing extracted. The techniques here are what should be theirs, not what exists within us.

I addressed these concerns in the third paragraph, and am not sure what part of my argument it is that you disagree with.

This will be part of the downfall of the patent system. This will cause a lot of people to rally who are against it. The ying/yang cycle and balance of the natural world.

I don't think that is going to happen at all.

This is the kind of craziness you run into when the absurd oxymoron that is "intellectual property" collides with the real world.